Work that changes how people lead, relate, and care.
Keynote speaker and facilitator · Halifax, Nova Scotia · Available worldwide
Verena partners with organizations navigating pressure, burnout, mistrust, and the gap between what a system intends and what people actually experience. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia — speaking across Canada, the US, and internationally.
“Having spent more than two decades convening policymakers, corporate leaders, healthcare professionals, researchers, community organizations, and social innovators across Canada, I rarely encounter work that has genuine cross-sector relevance. The Cost of Capable™ is one of those rare exceptions.”
Rhiannon Rosalind — Founder & CEO, Conscious Economics · former CEO, The Economic Club of Canada
“I use it almost daily with my clients and over the dinner table with my family. It helps people understand that their exhaustion is not a personal failure, and that their capacity may have come at a cost that deserves attention, care, and healing.”
Karen Rezk — Director · Registered Psychotherapist
9,000+Live audience
950,000+Total media reach
16+Years on stage
Verena has spoken to more than 9,000 people live, and reached over 950,000 across national television, broadcast, podcast and social. In 2026 she has been booked across seven sectors.
For Organizations
The work beneath the work your people actually need.
Verena works with corporate organizations, leadership teams, professional associations, government agencies, and healthcare systems navigating the human side of performance, culture, and change.
The most costly problems organizations face rarely announce themselves clearly. They show up in turnover, disengagement, fractured trust, failed initiatives, and leaders carrying more than the system knows how to support.
Her work helps organizations name what is actually happening beneath the surface — and respond with greater clarity, steadiness, and skill.
Grounded in sixteen years of clinical practice across occupational medicine, acute care, community health, federal corrections, and migrant health, Verena brings a perspective shaped by both frontline experience and systems-level work.
She founded the first clinic of its kind in Canadian Armed Forces history, and her work now informs training and system change at a national level.
Verena’s work sits at the intersection of leadership, medicine, art, and communication. At its core is a challenge to a fundamental assumption: that human connection is either intuitive or technical, when in reality, it is both an art and a science. That integration is what allows her to see — and shift — what more conventional approaches often miss.
For over a decade, she has spoken and facilitated for organizations across the country — from corporate teams and executive environments to public institutions, healthcare authorities, and mission-driven organizations — bringing a perspective shaped by both frontline experience and systems-level work.
What She Offers
Keynote Speaking
Strategic keynotes for conferences, leadership summits, and organizational events. Each talk is grounded in clinical depth and designed to shift how people think, lead, and relate.
Format: 45–60 min keynote | In-person or virtual
Workshops & Intensives
Half-day and full-day experiences for teams ready to go deeper. Designed for retreats, offsites, leadership development, and practical skill-building.
Format: Half-day or full-day | In-person or virtual
Clinical Training
Specialized training for healthcare, military, public sector, and high-stakes service environments where trust, context, and care delivery matter.
Format: 60 min to full-day | In-person or virtual
Lunch & Learns
Focused 60-minute sessions for busy teams. A strong entry point into Verena’s frameworks, language, and perspective.
Format: 60 min | In-person or virtual
Who this work is built for
Corporate and financial organizations
Government departments and agencies
Healthcare systems and hospitals
Post-secondary institutions
Professional associations and regulatory colleges
Non-profits and community organizations
Not sure what fits best?
Book a keynote if you need a clear, compelling talk for a conference, summit, or organizational event.
Choose a workshop or intensive if your team needs depth, reflection, and practical application.
Explore clinical training if your organization is working through culture, trust, or systems change.
Verena does not offer packages. She does not do off-the-shelf. She works with organizations that understand the most important problems — the ones costing them people, trust, and performance — do not come with a standard solution.
Whether you are bringing her to your conference stage, your clinical team, or your leadership table, the work is always tailored. The outcomes are always real. And the starting point is always the same.
Tell her about your people.
She will tell you what is possible.
Flagship Keynotes
Human performance. Belonging. Leadership.
The cost of what we normalize.
Verena Rizg speaks to the people organizations and communities rely on most, and to what that reliance costs. That cost is assumed to be psychological; we overlook the ways it surfaces at work, in relationships, and in our health.
One pattern sits under all of it. She calls it contingent belonging: the learned belief that safety, worth and acceptance have to be earned through performance, productivity, silence or self-abandonment.
Verena’s keynotes combine clinical insight, original spoken word and lived leadership experience. She dissipates defences and facilitates conversations people spend lifetimes avoiding.
“Lots of people are educated. Many are gifted speakers. Very few have IT — that cocktail of magic and magnetism that makes a moment memorable. Verena has IT. She is the rarest combo of energetic and empathetic. Approachable but holds you accountable. She is a wonder.”
Jonathan Torrens Actor, Broadcaster & Advocate
Keynote 01
The Cost of Capable™
The people who can always handle it are paying for it — and almost no one has named the cost.
The flagship keynote, built from the framework and the book of the same name — sixteen years of clinical practice across federal corrections, migrant health, community care, and acute care.
The chart says functioning. The body says otherwise: the jaw clenched tight enough to bring on migraines, the sleep that comes apart at four in the morning, the blood pressure that creeps up year by year.
This keynote names the structural condition beneath it — the predictable cost of being the one who holds it together when belonging is contingent on performance — and gives audiences a clinical vocabulary for what they have been carrying.
The keynote names the four behavioural patterns capable people fall into, and how to recognize their own.
Keynote engagements can include a signed copy for every attendee — the language of the room, in their hands when they leave it.
Best for Healthcare, leadership, government, and policy stages; corporate conferences, leadership summits, professional associations, executive environments. Format: 45–60 min keynote | Expandable to workshop, training day, or retreat session
“There are very few resources that make me stop and think, ‘Well shoot. That’s what I’ve been carrying.’ The Cost of Capable was one of them. After years of working in systems that quietly rewarded over-functioning, self-abandonment, and carrying more than any one person should, Verena Rizg’s framework gave me language for patterns I hadn’t fully recognized in myself.”
Hannah Cavicchi MSW, RSW, Clinical Social Worker
Keynote 02
For the Asking
A story of relentless conviction and purpose
Her family prayed for doctors, not poets. She became both. From registered nurse to founder of the first BIPOC-dedicated clinic in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces, every door she walked through was one she had to ask for first. A keynote about conviction that arrives before permission does.
Best suited for Opening and closing keynotes, women’s leadership, emerging leaders, mentorship, innovation, change leadership, convocations.
Keynote 03
Rain Check
On the joy we keep postponing until we’ve earned it
Nobody has ever cashed one. This keynote is about the life high performers keep scheduling for later. Joy is a practice, and most of us were never taught it.
Rooms leave lighter, and done waiting.
Best suited for Conference openers and closers, leadership retreats, all-employee events, audiences under sustained pressure or change.
Keynote 04
No Hard Feelings
Care versus coddling, and the conversations we have learned to avoid
Empathy without agency leaves people feeling seen but unchanged. This keynote gives teams the nerve and the language for the conversations they have been circling for years, and shows what becomes possible when honesty stops costing anyone their place.
Best suited for Executives, managers, people leaders, human resources, organizational culture, accountability.
“She has influenced the way that I practice being present with others when engaging in meaningful conversation that pertains to all manner of health.”
Jeremie Saunders Canadian Actor & Sickboy Podcast Host (CBC)
By theme
All four travel across healthcare, finance, professional associations, education, government and industry.
Resilience, capacity building, psychological safety and support, return after illness, trauma, burnout or injury01 · 04
Formats
The keynote creates the shift. The workshop builds the capability. Facilitation moves the conversation forward.
Every keynote deepens into applied work. The workshop is built from that keynote’s own framework rather than bolted on, so the room works with the same architecture it just heard.
Verena is a trained facilitator as well as a speaker. Leadership teams and professional groups can be taken through complex conversations, competing perspectives and meaningful change, rather than addressed from a stage and left to apply it alone.
60-minute keynote
Conference opening or closing keynote
Keynote plus interactive workshop
Leadership, manager or high-performer breakout
Half-day facilitated experience
Full-day facilitated experience
Standalone facilitation for leadership teams and organizations
Workshops that move people from insight into practice.
Not passive. Not generic. Not a slide deck borrowed from someone else’s program.
Verena’s workshops are experiential, evidence-based, and built for teams that are ready to do the actual work — not just talk about it. Every session is tailored to your organization’s needs, culture, and context. She builds from clinical expertise, lived experience, and sixteen years of knowing what actually moves people.
If your team needs to leave a session with something they can use — a shared language, a clearer picture of each other, or a skill they did not have before — this is where that begins.
Retreats, Offsites & Team Development
Leadership retreats, executive offsites, and team development sessions live here — not under keynotes.
A keynote is an hour. The work that happens in a retreat or a full-day offsite is different in kind: slower, deeper, and designed to produce something a room leaves knowing together.
Verena facilitates these engagements for organizations that want more than a talk. They want their people to leave with a shared language, a clearer picture of each other, and something they can actually use.
If you are planning a leadership retreat, executive offsite, or team development day — and you want the facilitation to be as substantive as the work your people do — this is where that conversation begins.
What These Engagements Look Like
Half-day and full-day sessions — in-person or residential
Executive team offsites focused on culture, trust, and relational leadership
Leadership retreats combining keynote, workshop, and facilitated reflection
Team development days built around a specific challenge or transition
Multi-day intensives for organizations in the middle of meaningful change
Workshop Focus Areas
All workshop content is tailored to your organization. These are the areas Verena works in most often:
Resilience & Burnout Prevention
For teams operating at high capacity for too long. This workshop builds practical tools for sustaining performance without burning through people — including how to recognize early signs of breakdown and what leaders can do about it before it becomes a retention problem.
Boundary Setting & Emotional Sustainability
Not a boundaries workshop in the self-help sense. This is a session on how high-functioning professionals learn to protect their capacity, communicate limits without damaging relationships, and build the kind of emotional sustainability that actually holds up under pressure.
Mental Health Literacy for Leaders & Teams
Leaders are often the first to notice when someone on their team is struggling — and the least equipped to respond well. This workshop builds the language, the awareness, and the confidence to have harder conversations earlier, and to create environments where people do not have to hide what is happening with them.
Culturally & Racially Responsive Team Culture
For teams ready to move beyond awareness into practice. This workshop examines how cultural background shapes communication, trust, and the experience of belonging — and what it takes to build a team culture where more people can actually show up fully.
Relational Leadership & Psychological Safety
For leadership teams that understand performance is relational. This session examines the specific behaviours that build and erode psychological safety — and gives leaders a practical framework for showing up in ways that make their teams more effective, not just more comfortable.
Trust-Building in High-Pressure Environments
In high-stakes environments, trust is not a soft skill — it is operational. This workshop applies Verena’s TRUST framework to team dynamics, exploring how trust is built, fractured, and repaired in real time, and what leaders can do to maintain it when pressure is highest.
Additional Workshop, Retreat & Intensive Topics
These sessions are best suited for retreats, offsites, team development, and longer-form leadership experiences. Each can be tailored as a workshop, facilitated session, or extended keynote.
01 — Reframing Joy: The Pursuit of Being Unshakable
Building the capacity to remain steady in unstable environments
Joy is not something you chase — it is something you build.
This session reframes joy as a form of internal steadiness that allows people to lead and function under pressure. Verena draws on clinical insight, personal experience, and sixteen years of working with people navigating impossible circumstances. The through-line is always the same: those who remain steady do not do so by avoiding difficulty. They do so because they have built something within themselves that difficulty cannot easily reach.
Audience leaves with:
A redefinition of joy that is grounded, not aspirational
Tools for building steadiness under sustained pressure
Insight into emotional resilience and what actually supports it
Best for: Leadership retreats, executive offsites, team reset experiences, wellbeing programming, leadership wellness intensives
Format: 60–90 min session | Ideal for retreats and offsites
02 — The Uninvited Teacher
What grief teaches us about living
Some of the most formative lessons do not arrive by choice.
This session moves through the landscape of loss — what it does to us, what it asks of us, and what it quietly makes possible when we stop resisting it. Drawing on clinical insight, personal narrative, and spoken word, Verena traces the relationship between grief and growth — not as a path from darkness to light, but as a reckoning that teaches us who we are and how we want to live.
This is not a grief workshop. It is an invitation to stop treating loss as the interruption of life, and start recognizing it as one of life’s most honest teachers.
Audience leaves with:
A grounded understanding of grief — clinical and human
Language for complex emotional experiences that often go unnamed
A reframed relationship to loss, change, and what comes after
Best for: Leadership retreats, university audiences, community organizations, healing-centred retreats, reflective spaces, personal development experiences
Format: 60–90 min session | Best suited for intimate or reflective environments
03 — From Fractured to Grounded
The science and soul of resilience
Resilience is not about bouncing back — it is about moving forward with integrity.
This session weaves together the neuroscience of trauma, the psychology of post-traumatic growth, and the deeply human art of making meaning. It explores what it actually takes to move forward without leaving yourself behind — and what leaders, teams, and organizations can do to support that process rather than inadvertently obstruct it.
Audience leaves with:
A grounded understanding of trauma, resilience, and the difference between them
Insight into post-traumatic growth — what it is and what makes it possible
Tools for rebuilding stability — personally and within teams
Best for: Executive teams, leadership summits, resilience trainings, retreats, leadership intensives, team rebuilding sessions
Format: 60–90 min session | Expandable to half-day intensive
04 — The Courage to Move
Grace, intention, and getting unstuck
Movement requires courage — and support.
This session explores what it takes to move forward when life no longer looks the way you expected. Weaving together storytelling, clinical insight, and spoken word poetry, Verena takes audiences through three movements: the weight of being stuck, the role of community in making movement possible, and the intentional practice of breaking barriers — not by force, but by grace.
Audience leaves with:
Insight into what keeps people stuck — and why willpower alone does not fix it
The role of community, witness, and support in making movement possible
Practical ways to move forward with intention rather than reaction
Best for: Women’s leadership conferences, diverse professional networks, university audiences, retreats, transformation-focused programs, coaching intensives, community-based events
Format: 60–90 min session | Ideal for retreats and team reset experiences
05 — Present, But Not Fully There
On presence, self-adjustment, and the cost of showing up
For professionals who have learned, often subtly, to adjust themselves in order to function, succeed, or be received.
This session examines what it means to be physically present, but internally divided — navigating professional spaces while filtering, monitoring, and reshaping how you show up.
Not as a failure of the individual, but as an adaptation to context.
Over time, this creates a quiet distance — between what is thought and what is said, between what is felt and what is expressed.
Drawing on clinical insight and lived experience, Verena explores how this pattern develops, how it impacts communication and performance, and what it takes to show up with greater clarity and alignment.
Audience leaves with:
A deeper understanding of what it means to be ‘present’ but not fully there
Insight into how internal filtering impacts communication and decision-making
Practical ways to reduce that gap and show up more consistently
Best for: Corporate teams, leadership groups, diverse professional networks, women’s leadership, ERG events, leadership retreats, team culture sessions
Format: 60–90 min session | Ideal for retreats, ERG events, and team development days
Not sure what fits best?
Book a keynote if you need a clear, compelling talk for a conference, summit, or organizational event.
Choose a workshop or intensive if your team needs depth, reflection, and practical application.
Explore clinical training if your organization is working through culture, trust, or systems change.
For healthcare providers, institutions, and systems ready to close the gap between the care they intend to deliver and the care their patients actually experience.
Verena’s clinical training is grounded in sixteen years of frontline practice in military health, federal corrections, and migrant health — environments where the gaps are widest and the stakes are highest. She has trained hundreds of Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada clinicians nationally and pioneered the clinician role across every federal prison in Nova Scotia.
She trains clinicians not only in what to do differently — but in how to see differently.
Training offerings include:
Culturally responsive mental health assessment and care
Migrant mental health — clinical frameworks and practical tools
Trauma-informed practice for complex populations
BIPOC patient care — building culturally and racially responsive practice, reducing harm, and rebuilding trust
Acute care and high-acuity clinical environments
Training healthcare teams to hold harder conversations
Not sure what fits best?
Book a keynote if you need a clear, compelling talk for a conference, summit, or organizational event.
Choose a workshop or intensive if your team needs depth, reflection, and practical application.
Explore clinical training if your organization is working through culture, trust, or systems change.
Four flagship keynotes on the hidden cost of high performance, belonging, relational wellbeing, and leadership: The Cost of Capable™, For the Asking, Rain Check, and No Hard Feelings. Each can be delivered as a keynote or expanded into applied work.
What formats does she offer?
Keynotes of 45 to 60 minutes, applied workshops built from each keynote’s own framework, and half- or full-day facilitated experiences for leadership teams and organizations.
Where is Verena Rizg based, and where does she travel?
Halifax, Nova Scotia. She speaks across Canada, in the United States, and internationally.
Through the contact page. Every engagement begins with a conversation.
Every Engagement Begins the Same Way.
With a real conversation.
Verena does not offer packages. She does not do off-the-shelf. She works with organizations that understand that the most important problems — the ones that are costing them people, trust, and performance — do not come with a standard solution.
Whether you are bringing her to your conference stage, your clinical team, or your leadership table: the work is always tailored. The outcomes are always real. And the starting point is always the same.
